The Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck. By James Grant Wilson.
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1869. First edition, trade issue. 8vo, contemporary blue half morocco, spine elaborately gilt, blue cloth sides, 607, [1], [4] pages, t.e.g. Frontis portrait, engraved title page (as published). Some light rubbing and slight sunning; a fine copy. Item #19697
This copy from the library of Halleck’s biographer James Grant Wilson himself, with a small ink autograph note mounted to a preliminary binder’s blank, “Purchased at the sale of the Sedgwick Library, New York, March 27, 1877. Jas. Grant Wilson.” (New York lawyer William Ellery Sedgwick had died in 1873; his library was sold at the Clinton Hall sale rooms on March 27 and March 28 in 1877, with a 68-page catalog published by Leavitt.) Wilson has somewhat grangerized his own copy here, with six related supplementary autograph pieces tipped in, including a manuscript agreement between publisher J. S. Redfield and Fitz Greene Halleck to “Stereotype, print and publish, and endeavor to sell your Poems in one volume 12mo, the proceeds of sales, after paying . . . $325.21 recently paid by me to Harper & Brothers, and all other expenses, to be equally divided between you and me as fast as realized,” dated New York, April 12, 1852, signed and endorsed by Halleck on the verso. (Redfield published three editions of Halleck’s poems between 1852 and 1854.) Additional inserted material includes 1887 letters from Horatio Gates Jones and from William Leete Stone to Wilson on articles submitted for Appletons’ Cyclopedia of American Biography (of which Wilson was an editor); an 1851 note from Edward Robinson to William Alfred Jones early in the latter’s career as librarian of Columbia college; and two notes from William Alfred Jones to Wilson on literary matters (thanking Wilson for a book on Knickerbocker literature, asking for return of a photograph used as source of an engraving), including thanks to Wilson for his kind words about “poor Hoffman”—presumably the Knickerbocker author Charles Fenno Hoffman, who was institutionalized for insanity for the last thirty years of his life. BAL 7001.
Price: $750.00